


these nights never end

by strangetowns



Category: Nothing Much to Do
Genre: Alcohol, Future Fic, M/M, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 13:52:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4140189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangetowns/pseuds/strangetowns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s you, and there’s Balthazar.</p>
<p>There’s love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these nights never end

**Author's Note:**

> alternatively: an exploration of Pedro and Balthazar's relationship after hours, hurriedly written before LLL disproves everything in this fic. And, once again, I drive myself insane with the random generation of numbers.
> 
> Inspired by Crystal Fighters' “[These Nights](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTnuZbp8vFs)”.

On the first night, you almost can’t believe that it’s happening even as it’s happening. You can’t make sense of all the things you’re feeling – all the emotions that tighten your throat and chase your pulse away – you can’t think straight – there’s nothing to think about, really, except for Balthazar and his bright, shining eyes.

It’s a whispered confession; it’s a squeeze of the hand as you try somehow to navigate your way around the room filled with others. Those are the things that dislodge your heart in your ribcage, that make you feel unsteady and overwhelmed on your feet. Somehow, somewhere, there’s a corner of quiet tucked away from the messy crowd and the bright lights of the party, and you let Balthazar pull you into it, partly because you don’t want to let go of his sweaty palm, partly because your heart feels full to bursting with the blood in your veins singing, _finally_.

Somewhere behind you, you can hear faint music and laughter.

Balthazar looks at you, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and the sounds of the world rise up in a dull roar. He doesn’t say what he wants to ask, but it’s a question you can hear as clear as day above the roiling noise, and for once in your life, standing here in a space of the universe that’s as close as you’ve ever been to him, everything just sort of makes sense.

You want to answer the question; you want to open your mouth and give him the words that he deserves, but it’s so loud, and you can’t tell anymore if it’s loud inside or outside of you. The noise could sweep you away with its tide. It could drown you.

He doesn’t wait for you.

There’s fumbling, and shaky hands, and lips that meet each other clumsily

And then, silence.

You don’t talk; the time for talking was long ago, ten minutes in the past, and you haven’t said all the words in your head yet – probably never will – but it’s enough for now, what has been said, and god, you’ve been so sick of talking, how useless it is. So you feel like you have to speak, but Balthazar has to know, doesn’t he, how much you don’t want to? That’s why you’re kissing. You weren’t prepared for how much you’d like kissing someone else – let alone kissing Balthazar – but it’s nice, you want to admit out loud. It’s better than you expected, and you were always one for high expectations.

You also didn’t realize how awkward it would be, finding just the right way to line up mouths that belong to different people; the first time you lean in, you miss and collide with Balthazar’s cheek, and then you get so nervous that Balthazar has to take over with a breathy laugh. You don’t know what to do with your lips when they’re finally touching his, don’t know if you’re just supposed to stay still or actually do something with them, but before you even have time to think Balthazar throws his arms around your neck, and while it’s not perfect, not by a long shot, somewhere in the middle of it –

when Balthazar makes a soft little noise into your mouth, when you manage to press just an extra inch closer to each other, when you stop caring long enough to close your eyes and just _be_

– you think nothing ever is, and that’s okay.

-

On the second night, it’s gentler, and quieter. You didn’t know quieter was possible.

It’s something about lying in bed next to him, the darkness, how close his heartbeat feels to yours; it’s something about the knowledge that you are the only two in the house, or maybe it’s just because you feel like you know slightly better what you were doing than you did twenty four hours ago. It’s how comfortable you already feel next to him – in some universe, it’s a level that’s probably unfair – or it’s how time seems frozen and endless, or it’s the chilly night air. Does the reason matter anymore?

You think that maybe you should stop thinking about why things are. Stop thinking in general. The loudness clutters your thoughts, except when you kiss him, and then everything is quiet, and quieter.

Nothing else happens tonight. Your clothes stay on, but the air feels so warm with intimacy they might as well be off. At one point, you give up on the kissing, and hold him in the dark, and talk about the things that do and don’t matter.

You tangle your fingers in the hair at the base of his neck, and you think he whispers something in the dark, something that sets your heart pounding; something you’re not sure you’re ready for.

When you ask, he shakes his head, tells you to go to sleep with a smile you can feel even if you can’t see it.

It sounded like three words. You don’t talk about it in the morning.

-

On the fifth night, against Balthazar’s vehement protests, you pop in a horror flick and place the bowl of popcorn on his lap so that he has incentive to stay.

Five minutes into the movie, he turns to you and tells you adamantly that this is a bad idea, then complains about how clichéd the soundtrack is all the way up until the first person is killed.

Twenty minutes into the movie, he flinches for the first time. You think you are probably having a lot more fun with this than you should.

An hour and fifteen minutes into the movie, the bowl of popcorn is on the floor, his knees are drawn up to his chest, and his hands are pressed over his mouth. If you didn’t know any better, you’d suspect that they’d been glued there.

Two hours into the movie, his eyes are fixed upon the screen. He hasn’t spoken in at least an hour and a half, and his head is on your shoulder.

That last bit is rather unexpected. Because you are a magnanimous being, and because you are starting to feel guilty for possibly traumatizing him, you take mercy and pause the movie. The special effects were spectacularly bad, anyway. And the night is still young.

-

On the twelfth night, you attend a gig of his.

It’s not the first gig you’ve been to. It’s not even the first gig you’ve been to since you got together. But it is the first you’ve attended without any of your other friends present. It’s almost a date, in a way, except that for most of it you won’t be next to each other.

It ends up not mattering. When he gets up on stage, his eyes slide easily over the audience until they lock onto yours. The corner of his mouth lifts in a smile, so slight of a movement you almost don’t catch it, and it’s unlikely anyone else did either. You can’t be sure if the sudden warmth in your cheeks is from that smile or the pint you knocked back before his set.

You were always impressed at how comfortable he looks with a guitar in his hands, how at home. You know performing makes him nervous, but if you didn’t it would be impossible to tell. You’ve seen nervous performers plenty of times before, heard how shaky their amplified breaths were over the microphone, saw the sweat on the backs of their fingers. Balthazar, though, belongs on a stage, and more than that he belongs with his music. He’s great enough on his own. Feeding off the energy of the crowd, his voice filling the room with his presence, making you feel like you two are the only ones in the whole venue? He becomes something rather magnificent, and you aren’t afraid to admit it to him.

He sings to the crowds; every now and then his eyes gently remind you who he’s really singing to. Your heart skips a beat every time he caresses the microphone with the word “love”.

When he finishes his set, you have to wait a while before he finds you. It’s all right, you’re used to the necessity of putting up his equipment and the inevitable derailment by other performers he will go through, but even though the next act – Viola & Sebastian, a set of androgynous, absurdly attractive folk rock twins – are pretty good, they can’t distract you from how antsy you feel, knowing he’s somewhere in the building where you’re not.

At last, you feel a hand slide into yours. You don’t need to look to the side to know that he will be there, and he doesn’t need to announce it; his perpetual presence is something you’re already used to.

-

On the twenty first night, you stand in front of your mirror and adjust your tie maybe nine or ten times while vacillating between worrying and feeling idiotic for worrying. Your fingers tremble so hard they almost pull your tie loose from its knot. What right do you even have to be nervous? This is Balthazar, and you’ve been his… well, you’ve been a _thing_ for three weeks now. It’s not like you’re going on a blind date, for god’s sake.

But it’s a date, isn’t it? You’ve hung out with Balthazar almost every night since that party at Beatrice’s house, and you hung out with him a lot of nights before that, but this is the first proper date – as in, one party asked, the other party said yes, and both parties actually planned it ahead of time – the two of you will have been on together. And that’s the problem. Looking into your mirror before you’re even supposed to pick him up, you already feel hopelessly out of your depth, and like this should have happened far too long ago.

John yells something sarcastic at you as you pass his door. Your mother smiles at you knowingly as you walk down the stairs. Your father wishes you luck as you leave the house. You sit in your truck for a minute or five, squeezing at the steering wheel, willing yourself not to get so nervous you crash into a mailbox on the way to his house. Nothing can go wrong. Everything will. It needs to be perfect. It won’t be.

This is stupid, you think to yourself, and pull out of your drive before you actually talk yourself into standing Balthazar up.

When you get there, you decide to get out of the car, flowers in hand, and march up to his door before you can give it a second thought. Not until, of course, you’ve rung his doorbell. Then you wait, and for the eight seconds it takes for someone to answer the door, the only company you have is your thoughts. What merry company, indeed.

In the half-second that you begin to contemplate running into the streets and never returning again, the door swings open. You’d thought, maybe, you’d encounter one of his parents. Instead, it’s him, staring at you with wide eyes. You stand there, frozen, wondering frantically what the expression on his face means.

And then he crashes into you, his arms tightening around your chest, his breath tickling the skin of your neck, and everything –

the fear that closes up your throat, the worry that litters your thoughts like grenades

\- kind of just fades away.

He whispers something about how good you look, and when you finally get the opportunity to show him the flowers he takes them in his hands with a delighted laugh and brings them to his face, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply. He takes your hand in his, and you walk to the car wondering why you were ever scared in the first place.

You were right before. Not everything ends up going perfectly. The restaurant mixes up your reservations and tells you to come back the next night. At the movie theater, you accidentally spill your drink on him. When you leave the building, it starts pouring rain.

And that’s okay. Instead of going to the restaurant for dinner, Balthazar points you to a food truck that serves ridiculously greasy, ridiculously cheap, ridiculously amazing sandwiches. You eat them while sitting on the curb, looking up at the dark shapes of trees and talking about the future. When you spill the soda, in the midst of your profuse apologies, he smiles, takes off his jacket, and uses the theater air conditioning as an excuse to press himself into your side. His fingers find a patch of your skin on your arm, traces haphazard, absent-minded patterns on it through the rest of the movie. It soothes you, in a way, even as the touches in the dark send invisible sparks into your veins.

When the heavens open up and the rain pounds down on the pavement, he glances up once to the sky, and runs into the falling water with his arms outstretched. He turns back to you, and you can hear his laugh from across the parking lot as he yells at you to come over there, already. You walk over to him, resisting the urge to run to the car, and he kisses you as the rain hits the ground in cold droplets. His lips are warm and damp. It’s almost too clichéd, kissing a boy in the rain, tasting the weather on his mouth; almost.

Everything’s okay. And you’re glad, honestly, that your relationship didn’t start out with a string of dates, like they say it’s supposed to. You’re glad you’re comfortable enough with him that a date like this feels less like the end of the world and more like the beginning of it. You wouldn’t have it any other way.

As he pulls back, close enough for his forehead to still be touching yours and close enough you can count the raindrops on his eyelashes, you think with measured awe,

_I’m in it for the long haul_

And it’s not as terrifying a thought as you once believed.

-

On the fifty third night, he texts you the lyrics to a song and asks you to sing it with him for Christmas.

A couple of months ago you probably would have said no.

You call him on the phone, partially to talk about it, partially just to hear his voice. You can’t see his face, but you can practically hear it; if you close your eyes, he smiles at you, a small and tired upturn of his lips. You can hear the words he thinks, even if he doesn’t say them out loud – that there’s a piece of his soul in every song he writes, and he wants to share this small part of him with you. You want to kiss him, this boy with music in his fingertips and affection in his words. You tell him yes, and manage not to change your mind, even when the word ‘camera’ starts being thrown around.

-

On the hundred and sixteenth night, you drive on a long and winding road up the side of a mountain.

It takes a while to get to where you want to go, most of the night, in fact. You’ll probably end up missing class in the morning.

Finally, you pull into an empty parking lot, and Balthazar gets out of the truck before you have time to turn off the ignition. He runs up to the railing, gesturing at you excitedly. You get to his side just in time for the sun to start peeking up behind the horizon.

It’s beautiful. You’ve never seen anything like it, the colors of the sky changing by the second, the newborn light painting itself on the surrounding mountains. You turn to him, his hands gripping the railing, smiling so brightly it almost eclipses the sun. You’ve never seen anything like it.

-

On the two hundred and eighty sixth night, you come back home after a long and hard night at work. The lights are off, and when you enter the bedroom, everything is dark. It’s the sound of Balthazar’s breathing that alerts you to the fact that he’s asleep, the regularity of it, like the beats in music.

You turn on the bedside table lamp, just for a short while, so that you can change your clothes without fumbling around blindly. He barely stirs, as expected; he’s a pretty deep sleeper. He doesn’t even wake up when you get into bed next to him.

Counting the number of his breaths helps you fall asleep.

-

On the three hundred and sixty fifth night, you tell him the words you’ve circled around cautiously, dreaded the thought of before you went to bed, dreamed about for months and maybe even years now.

You were scared of them, weren’t you? You were scared you weren’t ready to say them and mean it, or hear them and believe it. You’ve been scared your whole life that you might say them to the wrong person, or that when you admitted it out loud you’d have to let them go; you’ve been scared that they’re just another thing you can use to fuck things up with. But Balthazar will be with you for as long as you’re meant to be, and that’s okay. You’re okay with that.

There’s three of them.

He smiles, and he takes your hand in his, and he says,

I know.

Somehow, that seems to make all the difference.

-

On the four hundred and forty ninth night, there’s frantic cramming for a test you forgot to study for and warm coffee on his lips.

-

On the five hundred and fourteenth night, there’s a concert, and bright lights, and a bassline that touches you in places you thought only Balthazar’s words could.

-

On the seven hundred and ninety fifth night, there’s soft and heated kisses in the dark, his hands running over the skin under your shirt like he’s worshipping a god.

-

On the nine hundred and fifty second night, there’s muted television, and he falls asleep on your lap.

-

On the thousand and two hundredth night, there’s the most excellent beer you’ve ever downed.

-

There’s nights when you fall into bed early, and there’s nights when you fall into bed late, and there’s nights when you don’t fall into bed at all. There’s food, a restaurant you booked your reservations at a week in advance, pizza you ordered on a whim half an hour before the place closed, the spaghetti you failed to make but scraped off the bottom of the pan and ate anyway. There’s music, so much music; the radio at top volume, his guitar playing in your bedroom or on a stage. There are clothes, sometimes, and sometimes there aren’t.

There’s you, and there’s Balthazar.

There’s love.

-

On a full-moon night, you’re lying in bed, and you know Balthazar is almost asleep, but you’re nowhere close.

He leaves with his band for their first ever tour tomorrow. There are days and nights that you’ve spent apart from him. Not like this.

Your arms are wrapped around his chest. It will be the last time you’ll hold him this close in a long time. You press a kiss onto the back of his neck, where his skull joins with the bones of his spine. You feel a hand grip at your wrist, clumsily sliding fingers in the spaces between yours. And maybe you don’t say anything in response, but you hope the squeeze you give his hand tells him just how much you’re going to miss him.

He shifts in your hold until you loosen your arms, turning onto his side so that he faces you. The moon is bright tonight, and the blinds are open. The pale light shines in his half-closed eyes.

It’s hard not to be overwhelmed right now, hard not to feel the sudden onslaught of all the feelings you feel and have felt for this boy, and so you let it all wash over you. In a lot of ways, being here like this reminds you of your early nights, exploring all the ways you could be with another person, memorizing the planes of his face and his soul.

The silence, both in your words and your thoughts. That, especially, brings you back to your first night.

 He stares at you with a question in his eyes, and that’s the tipping point, the thing that _really_ opens up the floodgates, everything flooding your head and heart so hard it almost brings tears to your eyes, because you never really believed in soul mates, but you’ve always believed in him, and you’ve never believed so fervently than in this moon-kissed moment. It’s almost too much, all that you’re feeling, and maybe that’s why you say it, to relieve the sudden pressure, maybe that’s why you open your mouth and say,

Will you marry me?

And maybe he’s feeling the same thing, maybe that’s why he’s looking at you with star-filled eyes; maybe that’s why he opens his mouth and says back,

Yes.

In the morning, he will make breakfast for the both of you. He will press a kiss to your forehead, your cheeks, your mouth. He will leave with a wave and a promise to call you as soon as he can. He will call you two minutes later, and he will tell you how much he already misses you.

It doesn’t matter, right now, when it’ll happen. You’ll ask him again in the future, the question slipping out at strange, inopportune moments; in the shower, at the grocery store, behind the stage right before a concert, driving to the airport. Finally, on your knees, the way it’s supposed to be, with a ring and everything. He will say yes every time.

All that’s a future that takes place during the day. There’s something different about the day, something seen. It’s important for some moments to be seen. But it’s important, too, you think, to remember these moments in the dark you share with no one but him –

careless rushes of adrenaline, conversations that never run dry, decent and horrible movies, pounding music, skin stained with rain, idle guitar chords, a sun rising above the mountains, sleep and sleeplessness, words that are harder to say in the daylight, hushed kisses all over the place

\- and to hold on to them for as long as you can.


End file.
